 |
 | Home | Contact Us | FAQ | Search & Site Map | Link to Us |
 | Sign In | Join | Other 45 Sites in Network |
| HomeDiscussion GroupsEnglish UsageBritish EnglishESL Teaching Learnglish.com Contact UsLink To UsSearch & Site Map |
Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007Two-bits
I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. Is it connected in any way with the phrase "two-bit" (meaning cheap and nasty) e.g. "he's just a two-bit hustler" TOF On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote > I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I > started wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean > 25 cents. Is it connected in any way with the phrase "two-bit" > (meaning cheap and nasty) e.g. "he's just a two-bit hustler" A "bit" is an eighth part. In terms of dollars, a "bit" is therefore 12.5 cents; "two bits" is 25 cents (or two eighths/one quarter).  SignatureCheers, Harvey Canadian and British English, indiscriminately mixed For e-mail, change harvey.news to harvey.van > On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote > [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > -- > Cheers, Harvey Thank you, Harvey. I had considered this of course, but isn't the expression of older vintage than the advent of binary computing? Does the concept of a bit being an eighth part predate binary computing? TOF >> On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote >> [quoted text clipped - 16 lines] >vintage than the advent of binary computing? Does the concept of a bit >being an eighth part predate binary computing? Absolutely. SignaturePeter Duncanson, UK (in alt.usage.english) >> On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote >> [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > vintage than the advent of binary computing? Does the concept of a bit > being an eighth part predate binary computing? When the US started out, apparently different states each had their own versions (and values) for pounds, shillings, and pence, so they decided to create a new system. But they also needed to get a lot of coins in circulation quickly. So they simply adopted a widely- available (and reasonably stable) Spanish coin to be the basis of the new currency. This coin was the _ocho reales_ (8 reales or royals), which had been minted largely to transport Mexican silver back to Spain, but which had become a common currency. The American dollar was declared to be equal in value to one of these, which became known (or was already known) as the "Spanish milled dollar". (The Spanish coin was actually legal currency in the US until 1857.) The Spanish dollar, being worth eight reales, was often scored and broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, and presumably these fractional coins were also commonly encountered. Each of these "bits" was, therefore, worth an eigth of a dollar. The whole coins were known as "pieces of eight". SignatureEvan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |In the beginning, there were no 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |reasons, there were only causes. Palo Alto, CA 94304 | Daniel Dennet kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com (650)857-7572 http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ >> On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote >> [quoted text clipped - 11 lines] > vintage than the advent of binary computing? Does the concept of a bit > being an eighth part predate binary computing? When the US started out, apparently different states each had their own versions (and values) for pounds, shillings, and pence, so they decided to create a new system. But they also needed to get a lot of coins in circulation quickly. So they simply adopted a widely- available (and reasonably stable) Spanish coin to be the basis of the new currency. This coin was the _ocho reales_ (8 reales or royals), which had been minted largely to transport Mexican silver back to Spain, but which had become a common currency. The American dollar was declared to be equal in value to one of these, which became known (or was already known) as the "Spanish milled dollar". (The Spanish coin was actually legal currency in the US until 1857.) The Spanish dollar, being worth eight reales, was often scored and broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, and presumably these fractional coins were also commonly encountered. Each of these "bits" was, therefore, worth an eigth of a dollar. The whole coins were known as "pieces of eight". SignatureEvan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |In the beginning, there were no 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |reasons, there were only causes. Palo Alto, CA 94304 | Daniel Dennet kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com (650)857-7572 http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ > >> On 08 Jan 2007, TOF wrote > >> [quoted text clipped - 23 lines] > (or was already known) as the "Spanish milled dollar". (The Spanish > coin was actually legal currency in the US until 1857.) Hmm, that year always brings one particular reference to mind. I wonder if someone in authority said "the Spanish coin has no rights which the white man is bound to respect"? Probably not. > The Spanish dollar, being worth eight reales, was often scored and > broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, and presumably these > fractional coins were also commonly encountered. Each of these "bits" > was, therefore, worth an eigth of a dollar. The whole coins were > known as "pieces of eight". Fascinating. I love it -- and calling them "reals" -- how prescient was that? TOF > The Spanish dollar, being worth eight reales, was often scored and > broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, and presumably these > fractional coins were also commonly encountered. Each of these "bits" > was, therefore, worth an eigth of a dollar. The whole coins were > known as "pieces of eight". Or "pieces of nine" if you happened to get a parroty error. SignaturePeter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org Please note the changed e-mail and web addresses. The domain eepjm.newcastle.edu.au no longer exists, and I can no longer receive mail at my newcastle.edu.au addresses. The optusnet address could disappear at any time. The Peter Moylan entity posted thusly: >> The Spanish dollar, being worth eight reales, was often scored and >> broken into eight pieces, each worth one real, and presumably these [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > >Or "pieces of nine" if you happened to get a parroty error. Awk! Awk! Pieces of seven! Harvey Van Sickle: > > A "bit" is an eighth part. No. > > In terms of dollars, a "bit" is therefore 12.5 cents; "two bits" is > > 25 cents (or two eighths/one quarter). Not "therefore". A bit is an eighth *of a dollar*. See Evan Kirshenbaum's parallel posting explaining why. Fran Barlow: > I had considered this of course, but isn't the expression of older > vintage than the advent of binary computing? The computer usage "bit" is only about 60 years old, and comes from the fact that "binary digit" can be acronymized conveniently into a word meaning something small. And it was not until the coming of the IBM 360 series, about 35 years ago, that computers whose bits were grouped into 8's began to be the dominant variety. When I was at university, a few years later, the computer I preferred to use happened to have 36-bit words and could natively process 6-bit characters (BCD), 9-bit characters (used for ASCII with two bits per character ignored), or 18-bit halfwords. SignatureMark Brader, Toronto "For want of a bit the loop was lost..." msb@vex.net -- Steve Summit My text in this article is in the public domain. > The computer usage "bit" is only about 60 years old, and comes from > the fact that "binary digit" can be acronymized conveniently into a [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > characters (BCD), 9-bit characters (used for ASCII with two bits per > character ignored), or 18-bit halfwords. When I started using biggish (for the day) computers about 25 years ago, the machine I used had 36-bit words and could handle bytes of anywhere between 1 and 36 bits. (It had the notion of a one-word "byte pointer" that encapsulated the word address, byte size and offset within the word.) The most common byte size was 7 bits, for ASCII text, although the internal symbol tables used 6-bit characters (upper-case alphabetics, numbers, and various punctuation marks). EMACS used nine bits for input: seven for the character and one each for the control and meta bits. Eight-bit bytes were pretty much only used for communication with machines that preferred 8-bit bytes. SignatureEvan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |This gubblick contains many 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but Palo Alto, CA 94304 |the overall pluggandisp can be |glorked from context. kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com | (650)857-7572 | David Moser http://www.kirshenbaum.net/ > I had considered this of course, but isn't the expression of older > vintage than the advent of binary computing? Does the concept of a bit > being an eighth part predate binary computing? I wonder if it might go back to the legendary Spanish pieces of eight. Gerry >I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started >wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. Is it >connected in any way with the phrase "two-bit" (meaning cheap and >nasty) e.g. "he's just a two-bit hustler" All too easy to Google: "The term persists colloquially in the United States as a holdover from colonial America, when Spanish dollars minted in Mexico, Bolivia and other Spanish colonies were the widest circulating coin. Spanish dollars were deemed equivalent in value to a U.S. dollar. To provide smaller denominations, they were cut into eighths, or "bits". Thus, twenty-five cents was dubbed "two bits," as it was a quarter of a Spanish dollar. Correspondingly, the terms "four bits" and "six bits" referred to fifty and seventy-five cents, respectively. For example, "Six-Bits Blues" by Langston Hughes included the following couplet: Gimme six bits' worth o'ticket/On a train that runs somewhere . Because there was no one-bit coin, a dime (10 ¢) was sometimes called a short bit and 15c a long bit. The New York Stock Exchange continued to list stock prices in eighths of a dollar until June 24, 1997, at which time it started listing in sixteenths. It did not fully implement decimal listing until January 29, 2001, according to the research staff at the NYSE. As an adjective, "two-bit" can be used to describe something cheap or unworthy. For example, a "two-bit hood" is a hoodlum who steals/scams for chump change. SignatureTony Cooper Orlando, FL > >I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started > >wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. Is it [quoted text clipped - 24 lines] > unworthy. For example, a "two-bit hood" is a hoodlum who steals/scams > for chump change. Thanks, Tony. TOF > I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started > wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. I posted the following on Oct 28 2004. The URL images still work: As the parrot squawked, "Pieces of eight!" "Pieces of eight!" Early Americans also used whatever foreign coins they could get. English shillings, Spanish dollars, as well as French and Dutch coins, all circulated in the colonies. However, probably the most common coins were the large silver Spanish dollars called pieces of eight. To make change, the payee could chop the coin into eight pie-shaped pieces called bits (or Spanish reals, worth 12.5 cents). Two bits were worth a quarter of a dollar, four bits a half dollar, and so on. Even today, we sometimes use the expression two bits to mean a quarter of a dollar. Here are some pictures of Spanish silver dollar cut into halves, quarters, and eighths: http://www.jackmasters.net/mtmdc/mar2k2.jpg http://home.wanadoo.nl/jkm2729/imagecoins/spaans-dollar.gif [END QUOTE] > Is it > connected in any way with the phrase "two-bit" (meaning cheap and > nasty) e.g. "he's just a two-bit hustler" The physical coin use came first, and any sense of "cheap and nasty" came later. I would say the meaning there is "small-scale, unimportant," though. SignatureBest -- Donna Richoux >> I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started >> wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. [quoted text clipped - 30 lines] > came later. I would say the meaning there is "small-scale, > unimportant," though. Picayune, to coin a word? SignatureFrank ess > >> I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started > >> wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. [snip explanation] > > Here are some pictures of Spanish silver dollar cut into halves, > > quarters, and eighths: [quoted text clipped - 13 lines] > > Picayune, to coin a word? Perfect! I never knew the origin of that word before. SignatureBest -- Donna Richoux > > I was watching "Groundhog Day" the other day (again!) and I started > > wondering how the phrase "two bits" in AmE came to mean 25 cents. [quoted text clipped - 29 lines] > though. > -- I see. > Best -- Donna Richoux Very interesting. Thankyou Donna. TOF > Early Americans also used whatever foreign coins they could get. > English shillings, Spanish dollars, as well as French and Dutch > coins, all circulated in the colonies. In today's world, dominated as it is by fiat money, we often forget that not very long ago the various national units of currency were defined not as notional bookkeeping entries representing pieces of paper with green marks on them, but rather as a specific weight of precious metal. It mattered little whose face was stamped on the coin, so long as the fineness and weight were true. Of course, those Spanish dollars were named after an earlier Bohemian coin, the Joachimsthaler, from the silver-mining town of Joachimstal (now Jachymov in the Czech Republic). Most Americans did not trust paper money except when war or other exigency forced it upon them. Gold coinage continued to circulate in the U.S. until 1933, when the Roosevelt administration forcibly exchanged gold coinage for banknotes; the following year, the dollar was devalued relative to gold. The U.S. officially went off the gold standard in 1971, and private ownership of gold was re-legalized in 1974; a few years later, the U.S. Mint would reintroduce gold coinage for the collecting and investment markets. Silver coinage lasted a bit longer, with the last circulating silver coins being minted in 1964. Silver was discontinued by the Mint as a result of a seignorage crisis, which saw the silver quarter dollar replaced with a nickel-clad copper coin. (The Canadins stuck with silver until 1968, when they switched to an all-nickel coin. The current [since 2000] Canadian quarter is mostly steel.) The "silver dollars" of my childhood, minted from 1971 to '78, are also clad composition; the last circulating dollar with actual silver in it was minted in 1935. -GAWollman SignatureGarrett A. Wollman | The real tragedy of human existence is not that we are wollman@csail.mit.edu| nasty by nature, but that a cruel structural asymmetry Opinions not those | grants to rare events of meanness such power to shape of MIT or CSAIL. | our history. - S.J. Gould, Ten Thousand Acts of Kindness |
Reply to this Message |
 Sign In
 Join
 My Latest Posts My Monitored Threads My Blog My Photo Gallery My Profile My Homepage Start New Thread Enable EMail Alerts Rate this Thread
|
©2012 Advenet LLC Privacy Policy - Terms of Use
This website includes both content owned or controlled by Advenet as well as content owned or controlled by third parties.